Ghost Referrers

In the last few weeks, we have seen an influx of bot referral traffic in Google Analytics from adult web sites. This is off putting, and confusing to our clients. The good news is, these porn, or adult sites, aren’t actually visiting or affecting our websites. The bad news is though, they are skewing the data, and naturally we just don’t want to see these sites in our GA accounts.

Finding this Traffic in Google Analytics

You may have noticed adult sites in your referral traffic. The more popular sites showing up right now include:

  • pornhub-forum.uni.me
  • youporn-forum.uni.me
  • torture.ml
  • anal-acrobats.hol.es
  • sexyteens.hol.es
  • generalporn.org
  • sashagreyblog.ga

While most are obvious, pay attention to any referral traffic you may not recognize – sashagreyblog.ga isn’t an obvious adult site. But take my word for it, and save a click on this one – it is definitely an adult site.

Adult Site Ghost Referrals

In addition to looking at your referrals, take a look at your landing pages. It looks like these adult sites have landing pages on our sites. This is alarming – how are these sites creating landing pages on our clients’ websites? The answer is, these are not actual pages on the site. These fake landing pages, along with high bounce rates and hostnames that are fake or not set, are tell-tale signs of Ghost Referrer Spam.

What is Ghost Referrer Spam?

Ghost referral spam does not hurt or even directly access your site. These spammers are using code to hit random blocks of Google Analytics tracking IDs. We’ve even seen this porn spam show up in a GA account for a new UA code, that hadn’t been placed on a site yet. This is an important differentiation to understand, between ghost spam and bots or spiders that do actually scrape a site. Many users are confused why Google’s bot filter isn’t stopping these spammers. It is because they never actually touch your site.

Ghost Referrers GA Report

* to create this report in GA, go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages, then add a secondary dimension for hostname.

So why are they doing this?  Spammers are trying to get you to click through to the referral source. By clicking, they are driving you to another site with more spam and ads. These spammers are hitting thousands of sites, in an attempt to drive traffic back to their adult sites. They may also be directing traffic to affiliate sites, where they earn money if visitors buys something. Spammers don’t know who they are targeting, hence the invalid or not set hostnames.

How Can You Block Porn (or Other) Ghost Referrer Spam?

The most effective way we’ve found to block this traffic is with campaign filters in Google Analytics. To set up a campaign filter:

  1. Go to the Admin page at the top of your screen.
  2. Go to the view in which you want to set the filter. NOTE: it is important to always have an unfiltered view of your traffic. Filtered traffic can not be retrieved. You should always have a complete picture of what is happening on your site. We recommend keeping an All Website Data view, with no filters, and then creating a new view where you will place your custom filters, turn on Google’s bot filter, set up your goals, etc.
  3. Name your filter. In our example we’ve used Block Porn Spam.
  4. For Filter Type, choose Custom.
  5. For Filter Field, choose Campaign Source.
  6. Add the referrer to the Filter Pattern field.
  7. To block several referrers, you can use a regular expression, as in our example.
  8. Click Save.
How To Block Ghost Referrer Spam

How to Block this Traffic from Past Data

If you are familiar with filters, you know that they only work moving forward. So what can you do if you are preparing a report, and want to remove this spam from past data? You can use an advanced segment. Applying a segment will show you a subset of your data. A segment can be set to include or exclude certain data. In this case we will set up a segment to exclude porn referrals.

  1. Click Add Segment on your screen.
  2. Choose New Segment.
  3. Under Advanced, click Conditions.
  4. Change “Include” to “Exclude.”
  5. Change the default “Ad Content” to “Source.”
  6. Use “matches regex.”
  7. Start to type the referrer. It should come up in the auto fill drop down, so you know you have a legitimate referrer to you site.

You can see now, with the segment applied, how the traffic looks when you remove torture.ml.

Blocking Ghost Referral Spam

Meet Jennifer Strilko

Jennifer is the Director of Operations at Launch Digital Marketing. When not supporting the Operations teams, Jennifer enjoys reading and writing, up-cycling and playing soccer mom to her three kids.